Seven Samurai & The Magnificent Seven

Noel Burch notes that Japanese cinema is fundamentally different from the dominant form in Western cinema, and some of the differences are evident in comparing these two films. In spite of the fact that the John Sturges Western uses Seven Samurai as its source material, the underlying themes are different, and the script develops the seven fighters in a different way as well.

Westerners tend to view the samurai film as a form of Western because that is an easy way to categorize the films and because there are elements of similarity. Of course, the most obvious of these is that they are set in Japan's past as the Western is set in America's, but there are basic differences even in this element. The pas

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while American directors may be just as dedicated to doing the job and to getting others to do theirs, American films are shaped more around the actor than the actor is shaped to fit the material. In Kurosawa's films, taken as a whole, East and West meet in a unique form. Kurosawa often adapts what would be considered a form firmly based on a sense of reality and imposes a Japanese mysticism on that form. Kurosawa builds ideas and tension through a juxtaposition of images which impose a sense of fate and even doom, depending on the film and the period in the filmmaker's life when it was made. Kurosawa is best-known in the West for his series of samurai films, and here the iconography of East and West are most firmly mixed, while in some of his more experimental efforts, such as Do-des-ka-den, the iconography of Japan may be so heavy as to baffle most Western viewers altogether. As Desser notes, the precise relationship between Kurosawa's expression of the samurai film and the motifs of the American Western are uncertain: "To the Japanese mind, the self-sacrificing hero is the most admirable hero of all" (Desser 147). In the Hollywood film, it is usually expected that the hero will still be standing at the end. Yet, the myt
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Approximate Word count = 1721
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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